next »

[PistolPete]

Hi All,


I've been running 2.0 for a little while in Hyper-V and not getting the performance I was expecting.
I've been watching the CPU utilisation and noticed it's really high when I start to crack up the speed (even tho the CPU is more than double the clock speed of the old hardware firewall I used without issues) so I have decided to allocate the VM 2 CPUs instead of one.

All is well, except whilst Pfsense reports that it has 2 CPUs, but barely touches one of them (CPU0) and leave CPU1 struggling.

Do I need to reinstall Pfsense or can I get it to start using the other CPU properly?



Pete

[berniem]

Well, since pfSense does ask you whether you're running a single CPU or multi, it's a safe bet (including also your emperical observation(s) that the second virtual CPU is being ignored) that you'd have to install again.

[PistolPete]

Not the answer I was hoping for 

Oh well - something else to add to my every growing 'to do' list.

[jimp]

No need to reinstall to switch kernels.

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Switching_Kernels

[PistolPete]

Thanks - came just in time.  I came in here as I couldn't remember the location of my start script and I spotted this.

However, still getting the same problem - one CPU almost rammed and the other at 2-3% and throughput still all over the place.
I reckon it's probably due to the crap virtual NICs.

Sawpped back to my old Watchguard and can max my line again - Time for a hardware upgrade and to forget Hyper-V

[Kharcoff]

As I managed to get it working, will give a piece of advice, just save your current configuration by going to Diagnostics>Restore/Backup and get an iso from the latest release and re-install it, it takes 5 minutes max, and you can after just restore your backup to have everything in place. Just pay attention to create the VM with two cpus, legacy network adapters, enough memory (1gb), is better than try to adjust your current install. Oh, don;t forget that on Hyper-V and on 2.0, every time you boot the machine (after updates), or manually, you have to restart the interfaces, by going on the Hyper-V manager, opening the VM and selecting the Shell and then enter this:
ifconfig <name of your interface0> down
ifconfig <name of your interface0> up
ifconfig <name of your interface1> down
ifconfig <name of your interface1> up
in my case interfaces are de0, de1.

Good luck!
K

[PistolPete]

I'm already running legacy adaptors, but will it seriously need 1GB ram?? I've got plenty in the Hyper-V server so it's not an issue.

Update:  Still the same.

[AlbinoPenguin]

hmm, i am watching this thread with great interest, i was going to invest in a hyper-v server and run pfsense on it; but i have read a few posts now stating there are bandwidth issues, is this the case with all hyper-v servers? or just a misconfiguration?

thanks.

[berniem]

It must vary from config to config because when I run pfSense under Hyper-V, I do see a bit of a performance hit, but not like what others are reporting.  I also have never had to do any of the interface down/up hacks that some seem to need.

I guess it's very much ymmv.  :-)